The Warren Commission had concluded in 1964 that only three shots, all from behind, all from Oswald's rifle, were fired in Dealey Plaza as the motorcade passed through. Using sophisticated techniques, a team of scientists enlisted by the House committee filtered out the noise and came up with "audible events" within a 10-second time frame that it believed might be gunfire.
The sounds of assassination were recorded at Dallas police headquarters when a motorcycle patrolman “inadvertently” left his microphone switch in the "on" position, deluging his transmitting channel with what seemed to be motorcycle noise. Either way, that's 'beyond a reasonable doubt.' " We thought there was a 95 percent chance it was a shot. The main thing is when push comes to shove, he increased the degree of confidence that the shot from the grassy knoll was real, not static. "It shows that we made mistakes, too, but minor mistakes. "This is an honest, careful scientific examination of everything we did, with all the appropriate statistical checks," Blakey said of Thomas's work. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel to the House Assassinations Committee, said the NAS panel's study always bothered him because it dismissed all four putative shots as random noise - even though the three soundbursts from the book depository matched up precisely with film of the assassination and other evidence such as the echo patterns in Dealey Plaza and the speed of Kennedy's motorcade. Thomas, a government scientist and JFK assassination researcher, said it was more than 96 percent certain that there was a shot from the grassy knoll to the right of the president's limousine, in addition to the three shots from a book depository window above and behind the president's limousine. It says the panel failed to take into account the words of a Dallas patrolman that show the gunshot-like noises occurred "at the exact instant that John F. The panel insisted it was simply random noise, perhaps static, recorded about a minute after the shooting while Kennedy's motorcade was en route to Parkland Hospital.Ī new, peer-reviewed article in Science and Justice, a quarterly publication of Britain's Forensic Science Society, says the NAS panel's study was seriously flawed. Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of firing three shots at Kennedy from a perch at the Texas School Book Depository, could not have been in two places at once.Ī special panel of the National Academy of Sciences subsequently disputed the evidence of a fourth shot, contained on a police dictabelt of the sounds in Dealey Plaza that day. the result of a conspiracy." A shot from the grassy knoll meant that two gunmen must have fired at the president within a split-second sequence. Kennedy's murder in Dallas in 1963 was "probably. That was the key finding of the congressional investigation that concluded 22 years ago that President John F. The House Assassinations Committee may have been right after all: There was a shot from the grassy knoll.